"Yes; fussy, stiff, critical--that's what it means, as near as I can make out. It's a word Dick brought home from London." "H'm," said Susan Bates, "I'll remember it." The men, meanwhile, sat round the dining-room table. Marshall smoked with the others and tried to forget his boutonnière--the first he had ever worn. "I shall make them very small and unobtrusive," Susan Bates had said; "only a dozen violets." Marshall noticed that Bates had put his flowers into his right-hand button-hole, and Bingham his into his left. Jane saw her father hesitate; finally he imitated Bates. "Well, that's cutting it pretty fine," thought the girl; "I wonder if there is a right or wrong way. But think of pa with any button-hole bouquet at all! We shall budge him yet!" She smiled; she knew the forces were all arrayed against him to-night. "What this town needs more than anything else," Bingham was saying, "is a big assembly hall--one with a capacity of ten thousand, say. Something not too fine--we've got that already; and something not too rough--we've had that in plenty. A hall suitable for conventions, for promenade concerts, for mass-meetings, for horse shows--in short, something after the fashion of that magnificent thing in New York." "The Madison Square Garden?" asked Bates. "You're perfectly right." "Now that Garden," pursued Bingham, "is not exactly a paying investment--wasn't meant to be. The last time I was down East--" "Yes--" --"some fellows there quoted it to me as an evidence of public spirit--the spirit that we here suppose not to exist in New York at all. The men who put it up could easily have got more on their money; but there it stands, one of the most useful and beneficent features of the whole city." "We ought to have one here," declared Bates. "And I should like to build it," declared Bingham. "The man who would give such a thing to Chicago, or who would even take the headship of it and make a suitable contribution, would be doing as much for himself and for the town as any one man well could." "But don't look at me," said Bates. "My wife has drained me: dry--you know about her dormitory and all her other schemes. Look at--well, look at Marshall. What is Marshall doing for the good of the city?" Marshall lowered his eyes and fingered the broad foot of an empty wineglass. He sat between two of the great powers of the town, and he had never felt smaller. He wondered whether he had deserved his success; he wondered if he himself had really made it. After all, he had come on the ground before competition had fairly set in. He had done nothing by force or by audacity; he had been slow, cautious, even timorous, and he confessed inwardly that there were men in his own employ--men on a mere salary--who were cleverer, readier, more resourceful than he--men who, in a fair field and on even terms, could have distanced him completely. He gave the wineglass another turn or two, and did not lift his eyes.